Mint is a new product recently released to track the statistics on your website. It has gotten much attention from several areas, and I thought it would be worth it to check it out.

I am currently using StatCounter.com to track the traffic to my site. It is really useful when you use their paid service which keeps track of more than the last 100 visits to your site (the free version cap). It lets you view all the regular stats as well as “drill down” to see the actual path a single visitor took through your site. But, it is a monthly subscription service, which means potenially hundreds of dollars a year, even though it’s not much each month.

Mint is a one-time site liscence fee of $30. So I felt it would be a good investment over the monthly fees of StatCounter. What sums up my thoughts upon using Mint is this: a regular stat tracker was given a great design and some cool javascript effects to make things easier to use. It looks wonderful, but it lacks much. Things such as tracking return visitors, displaying charts and graphs of the data, and being able to drill down to see individual users and their paths are things that really make a web stat tracker useful. A good user interface is important as well.

One bonus to Mint is it can be extendable with plugins or “pepper” as it’s called for marketing. Although, I’m not sure if extras will be sold by other developers, release for free even though the original is a paid product, or both. I should make it easier for the maker of mint to deploy new features anyway.

Overall, I enjoy Mint, and it’s price is much more favorable than the recurring price of StatCounter. I will stick with it and create some nice graphs of the data for my personal use (whenever I get spare time). Perhaps sell it as a plugin or something.

it’s been a long time since i’ve used statcounter, and had admittedly forgotten about it till i just read your post. one thing that i loved in statcounter is that you can follow a single visitor through your site pageview by pageview. both mint and GA have failed me in that.